‘I better go,’ I told him.
‘So soon?’
We crossed the road to the station, Dad still wearing the clothes he had slept in. We hugged on the platform. I brushed a few crumbs off the front of his sweater. He waved to me as my train pulled out, and that was the last I ever saw of him.
By the time he died, attitudes had hardened significantly on all sides. There had been the letters to Mum and the screaming down the phone to me, and there had been a showdown with my sister that had started out as a friendly chat and ended up as a shouting match. In the end, my brother had been the last man standing, the only one of us still in my father’s good books, and the one he relied on for help. It couldn’t have been easy for either of them. I knew all about dementia from watching my mother’s disintegration. I can only imagine my brother was witness to the same degeneration in Dad, over about the same length of time, although Eliot never divulged as much. He didn’t even call to tell me Dad was dead. I found out later, in 2010, from Jenny, who liked to call me once in a while to catch up on my news, and to tell me how much she missed Mum.
‘I was so sorry to hear about Gordon,’ she said.
‘Pardon?’
‘He died.’
‘When?’
‘Three months ago. You must have been away in Japan.’
‘Sarah would have told me.’
‘I heard from Murray.’
Murray was my cousin. He and Eliot saw a bit of each other in Sydney. Ben had told me Murray and Eliot sometimes played tennis together.
I rang Sarah straightaway.
‘Dad’s dead,’ I said.
‘You’re kidding.’
She was as incredulous as I was, not about Dad’s death, which we had been anticipating, but about the fact that it had taken so long for us to find out.
There wasn’t a funeral as far as I was aware. My only informant in these matters was Ben and he never mentioned any plans. But he did tell me, much later, what had happened to my father’s ashes.
‘Dad went horse riding in Mt Kosciuszko National Park,’ he said, ‘and scattered the ashes there.’
‘Interesting choice,’ I said.
I was perplexed by the way Eliot handled things, made decisions on his own that, by rights, belonged to all of us. I know he had his reasons. I’m certain he thought that Sarah and I had abandoned our father, which in a sense we had, but only after years of provocation. The truth was that my father didn’t really like us girls: we both knew it, and, over time, we both reached the conclusion that we didn’t really like him either. I was also immensely sad, because here was yet another missed opportunity for my brother and sister and I to reach some kind of reconciliation after all the years of conflict and dispute, to finally bury all the acrimony of our parents’ tempestuous marriage and make peace with each other. I pictured Eliot standing alone in the snow gums and pouring Dad out onto the ground at his feet, while his horse chomped greedily on the sweet alpine grass.
For a year or so, when I was in primary school, Dad flew supply planes for the Snowy Mountains Authority. He was based in Cooma, and lived there in a company barracks during the week. Every Friday night he drove to Canberra where Mum had a job teaching in a high school. He seemed to enjoy the life, at least for a while. He said the barracks reminded him of air force life, and he liked the men he met on the job.
‘Fascinating chaps,’ he told me. ‘From all over Europe. The mess is like a meeting of the United Nations.’
He gave me a picture book about the dam the men were building and about the wonders of hydro-electricity. I studied it dutifully but without much comprehension.
I don’t know why he left Cooma so soon. Perhaps it was the driving to and fro, perhaps it was the winter weather closing in. It could be foul up in the mountains, he said, and dangerous.
‘You never know quite what you’re heading into when you set out in the morning,’ he said. ‘It can turn so fast.’
Perhaps it was just his perennial restlessness, coupled with an irresistible job offer to fly for Fiji Airways.
‘It’s a dream come true,’ he told us. ‘Chances like this don’t come along too often.’
And so we went to Fiji, at least three of us went. Eliot and Sarah were left behind in Sydney boarding schools, which they no doubt resented for the rest of their lives, as I would have, too, if it had happened to me.
If it had been my choice Dad’s ashes would not have been scattered in the mountains. Apart from that one year, he never spent any time around Mt Kosciuszko. It certainly wasn’t home for him, any more than Ceduna was home, or Armidale, in New South Wales, where we lived for a while, or Suva, or Nairobi, or any of the other places we followed him to over the years. The truth was he didn’t have a home. The closest he came to finding one was probably Glasgow, but by then it was far too late to make a difference. If it was a question of where he was happiest in his life, I’d guess it was in the cockpit of a plane flying somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. He loved to explain to me the meaning of the point of no return.
‘If I’m flying between Nadi and, say, Port Vila,’ he told me, ‘I’m at the point of no return when I have enough fuel to reach Port Vila but not enough to get back to Nadi. In which case, I better hope I’ve read the charts right and Port Vila’s where I think it is.’
Talk of crisscrossing the Pacific energised Dad in a way that nothing else could. Life on the ground was a chore by comparison, something to be suffered until the time came to take off again. If it had been my choice I would probably have scattered Dad’s ashes out of a light plane in mid-flight, somewhere out to sea, where they could have blown about in the wind currents for a while then sprinkled down over the waves. Who knows where he would have ended up then, in tiny bits and pieces spread anywhere and everywhere.
I’m not sure what I want done with my ashes. My problem is that, like Dad, I’ve spent my life moving around, so I’m not sure where to call home. In the past, whenever someone has asked me where I’m from, I’ve always struggled to answer.
‘I was born in Queensland,’ I say. ‘But we left when I was a baby.’
As if that means anything. Only that my mother came back to Queensland to have all her children, because my father was never home to look after her. I was actually born in a hospital in Southport, where Ril and Norman had a house they retreated to in the summer, and where all the families gathered for seaside holidays. Mum brought me back to the house after my birth and we were cared for by a nurse, which seems like an extravagance now, but these were boom years in the wool trade and such luxuries were apparently not unusual. I don’t know where Dad was at the time, flying for the old Trans Australia Airlines I think, out of Sydney. Or perhaps he had already quit TAA and taken up the crop-dusting job based in Armidale. In any case, I have no memory of Southport, so it can’t really count as home. I don’t even know why I mention it when I’m asked, only that you have to start your story somewhere, and what happened next is too convoluted to bother with.
I should probably say I grew up in a car, crossing some interminable stretch of country, between a town I barely remembered, and a town I’d never heard of. It was the travelling that I recalled the best. Mum was usually at the wheel, Dad having gone ahead of us. In my memory, it was Mum who packed up all the houses, piled our belongings in the car, farmed out all the abandoned pets, then set off cheerfully down the road with hope in her heart that this might be the last time, the time we might finally settle and put down roots. But it was not to be, at least not for some years.